Infant Loss or Miscarriage

If you’ve experienced the sadness of losing your infant pre-birth or after birth, and you’re feeling like you need a safe place to talk, professional counseling services are offered for this issue. Sometimes you need a private outlet for your grieving process where you can create personal and spiritual meaning. Creation of of personal, family rituals are encouraged.

It is only recently that pregnancy loss has been recognized as an event that causes real grief. The subject pregnancy loss covers a broad range of experiences, including miscarriage, stillbirth, infant death and medically induced abortion.

Using this definition, one in four women experience a pregnancy loss in their lifetime. Prior pregnancy loss is a risk factor for development of a perinatal mood disorder. Grief experienced previously may be re-experienced at the time of your new pregnancy and birth. It may unexpectedly cause feelings of sadness to occur as you care for your baby in the first year, at a time when you would like to be experiencing joy.

Grief is a universal, normal human emotion that usually subsides with time, but of course, as everyone knows, is experienced at different levels over a lifetime. Recent studies show that the emotions surrounding a miscarriage are felt even after fourteen years. Pregnancy loss encompasses different experiences. Perhaps you miscarried, perhaps your baby was born stillborn, or perhaps you experienced the shock of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Whichever it may be, you lost your baby and your grief and pain are overwhelming. You feel this grief on a body level. Your stomach may be upset, you may have diarrhea, joint pains, or headaches. These are normal grief reactions as grief is experienced on both a body and mind level.

EMDR, expressive art, visualization and rituals are used to assist with helping people express their grief and positively move forward.